Meeting multiple needs

With six universities and other learning centres, the Qatar Foundation’s Education City is a hub for students in Doha. While building this site, the Foundation has understood that it is not only the educational needs of these students that have to be met, but also social and sporting requirements. Serving this purpose is the Student Centre, a multi-purpose site with a range of entertainment facilities that have multiple uses.

The Centre includes a cinema, sports hall, gym, food court and TV room, as well as a large multi-purpose hall and conference rooms equipped for presentations and video conferencing. Handling the differing needs for the A/V installation in each of these areas was Doha-based systems integrator Techno Q.

 ‘The Student Centre is for all of the universities around the Qatar Foundation,’ explains Techno Q projects engineer Vinu Thomas. ‘It has entertainment areas, a movie theatre, a fitness centre, and an indoor sports court. Then we have a few meeting rooms and conference rooms and a multi-purpose hall, plus BGM across the whole site.’

While each area could have been a project in its own right, Techno Q tackled the whole site as one installation. This provided a particular advantage for the company as a number of the rooms needed to be interconnected on one central system. The team from the systems integrator spent a total of nine months on site in a phased approach as the building was completed.

While each room provided its own unique challenge, the company used certain brands across the whole site to meet the individual needs. ‘All the sound system is from JBL and Crown, JBL for the speakers Crown for the amplifiers. Microphones are Shure,’ says Abdulla Alansari, executive director at Techno Q.

The heart of the Centre is its cinema with a 12m x 7m screen. The three-month staggered installation of this room saw Techno Q equip the venue with a Digital Projection 15,000 Ansi Lumens projector, and a surround sound system from JBL. ‘The theatre can be used either for movies or for presentations,’ says Mr Thomas. ‘When it is used for movies, the surround system front, right, left and subwoofer function, and for presentation only the ceiling speakers and the front speakers are used. You can give a presentation from the podium or play a movie from the DVD players.’

‘From the presentation you get two front speakers to make it sound more natural,’ adds Mr Alansari. ‘For the audience it would be odd if somebody was speaking and the sound was only coming from above them.’

The systems integrator used specialist cinema speakers from JBL behind the screen for the front speakers and four left, four right and four rear pro surround speakers. For the ceiling speakers it opted for Control 26CTs. ‘There are 15 ceiling speakers and two suppression mics,’ says Ahmed Abouzoor, site project engineer for Techno Q. ‘The suppression mics are used for recording presentations.’

The speakers are powered by a mix of Crown XTi 2000, XTi 4000, CTs 600 and CTs 1200 amps housed in the cinema control room. Also in use for the cinema are BSS processors, Shure wireless mics, a range of equipment from Extron and a Crestron touchscreen control system.

This control system is the main feature that runs through the entire site. ‘There is one main control room for all of the locations,’ says Mr Abouzoor. ‘We are controlling all of them through a Crestron QuickMedia system over Cat-5 cables. Each area has its local control room and the main one controls all of them.’

It is this functionality that Mr Thomas describes as the ‘highlight’ of the overall system. ‘All the rooms are controlled from the master control room. The user can push the signal from one room to another. For example they can push a presentation from the 30-person room to a 15-person room. They have a touchscreen so that they can see the picture as well as audio. They can push the signal from any part to another.’

There are a number of conference rooms of varying sizes around the site all connected by the QuickMedia system. While the number of people the room can accommodate may vary, the A/V equipment installed does not. ‘We have small 15-person conference rooms with one plasma connected to a laptop for presentation,’ explains Mr Thomas. ‘The larger 30- and 40-person conference rooms have presentation systems plus video conferencing from Polycom. The presentation system has two options – either it can use a Draper projector screen and a Sanyo projector or a 64-inch Panasonic plasma screen. The screen is on the front wall and the plasma is on the side wall.’

One of the unifying factors for this project is the scale of some of the rooms involved. The indoor sports hall with its 65 speakers hung from the ceiling for BGM and announcements can be separated into two separate courts or used as one large arena. The food court is also on the grand scale with flush mounted ceiling speakers installed on the 15m ceiling and eight plasma screens dispersed around the room showing satellite TV feeds.

Another large space with multiple uses is the multi-purpose hall. This is three combined halls which can be used as one large room or divided into individual sections, as such the A/V equipment in the control room has been tripled. Each hall has a 15,000 lumens digital projector and a 270-inch screen. ‘It has a main control room which we can use to control the system,’ says Mr Thomas. ‘Each room has individual control screens from Crestron. From the main control room on the first floor we can control each room, A, B and C, and from the ground floor, the user can control the room from the test screen. Either they can input the laptop from the podium or they can use the source such as a DVD player or music CDs.’ The room also features a wireless microphone system from Shure and videoconferencing setup. Overall there are ten microphones – each of the three halls is covered by three mics plus there is a wired mic.

Mr Thomas believes that this project shows ‘the benefits of getting a job done with a systems integrator that can foresee and address all A/V needs in a controlled way, install single systems that can be interconnected for multi-purpose use, and is able to see the current and future needs of systems.’

The Student Centre installation highlights that large multi-purpose projects can be daunting in terms of scale. However, it also shows that large interconnected systems can be used to good effect to ensure individual rooms are tailored to their particular needs, yet also fit in with the larger needs of the venue. Techno Q has used this design principle to build a system that truly fits its multi-purpose remit.

www.technoq.com